Mr. Wilson's War

Mr Wilson's War by John Dos Passos

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John Dos Passos started out his career as a socialist author in the 1920s after a stint as an ambulance driver during World War I. When I saw this book, I assumed that it had been written in his earlier radical years, but, in fact, it was written in the early 1960s after his conservative turn.

Based on my false assumption, I thought that this was going to be an indictment of war profiteering and the kind of things that the younger Dos Passos attacked so fiercely in his USA trilogy. In fact, though, this is an engaging and insightful history book. Dos Passos begins with President McKinley in the late 1890s and basically follows presidential politics through to the last years of the Wilson administration.

I learned a lot from this book, although I have read a few books on World War I. Dos Passos has a nice way of humanizing his subjects and presenting them as multi-dimensional human beings. The relationship between Woodrow Wilson and his advisor, the “confidential colonel,” Edward Mandell House is a major feature of the latter part of the book. I had read of House previously, but I had not appreciated the extent of House's representation of Wilson or Wilson's dependence on House. Likewise, I knew that Wilson's wife was named Edith, but I hadn't known that Wilson's first wife died during his first term of office, or that he had remarried during his second term.

As I was reading this book, I was put in mind that the years between 1916 and 1918 looked a lot like the present era. Wilson was re-elected after a heavily contested election. Wilson won only when California's votes were finally totaled and he won by less than 4,000 votes. Likewise, in our era of cancel culture and manufactured outrage, Wilson pioneered censorship measures to silence opponents of the war. And, of course, the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak is the modern pandemic by which we measure the 2020 pandemic.

I think my favorite feature of Dos Passos's USA trilogy was his short biographies that were peppered throughout the books. Dos Passos always had a nice way of getting to the nub of the person he was talking about and presenting that person in a sympathetic way. He approaches historical figures in a way that treats them as fallible human beings and yet preserves their dignity.

This is a first-rate history book that is worth the investment of time.